Personal Logo – Part II

Taking up where I had left off, the Creative Workshop encourages you to take a second 30-minute period and “explore how you can apply your logo to a stationery system, a brochure, and a personal website.”

I started my sketches with business cards, developing 8 thumbnails in under 5 minutes and midway through beginning to mess with the look of the logo by staggering the E and I.

I went on to work on what a cover letter/letter head might look like followed up by re-applying the design to business cards.

Time: 7.5 minutes

Given that I had changed the logo around I went back to Illustrator. This took the most amount of time and I sunk a good 15 minutes into wiggling paths around until I got the E and I to look proper. Even now I’m not totally okay with it but when I saw that I had consumed over 2/3rds of my time for this project and had very little to show for it, I moved on.

Time: 25 minutes

I created a new document for a 3″ x 5″ business card with quarter inch bleeds and got to work. I first moved over my geometric vertical logo line from the previous document. After reducing the size to fit I realized that I hadn’t changed my preferences to resize strokes and special effects properly. I lost a few minutes just wiggling around path lines as I reduced the stroke.

I then spent a few hair brained moments composing the geometric-sideways-city line shape into an object that I could fill with color. By this time, 30 total minutes had elapsed but I presumed since I was engaged, practicing in Illustrator, and had an idea in mind I could cheat and keep going.

This is where not knowing the tools so well slows me down.

Color is one of the most difficult design elements for me. I was surprisingly good at being able to see how foreground and background colors interacted in terms of color theory but when I have to choose color from a list of swatches? It is overwhelming.

Purple is an easy place to start for me as it is a favored color, but I did not want something quite as startling as yellow for a business card (in hindsight I wonder how that would look), so I selected what I presume is close to last year’s Pantone color that I had saved and began placing some of my elements.

Total Time: 40 minutes
Tools Used: Pen & Paper, Adobe Illustrator

Bonus! In a quick five minute session I changed the background color of the card and you can see how much the design changes just with color alone: